The Living Memorial to Boris Nemtsov Is the Most Radical Political Statement in Russia

A stone’s throw from the Kremlin, mourners hold an around-the-clock vigil for the assassinated opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, which is now entering its fourth year.

Photograph by Nikita Shvetsov / Anadolu Agency / Getty

Totalitarianism works in three ways: it kills people, it kills will, and
it kills memory. Vladimir Putin’s regime is more selective about its
targets than its Soviet predecessor was, but it uses the same old tools
to exert control. To oppose its core is to assert life, will, and
memory. This is the project of a group of activists who have been
keeping vigil on a Moscow bridge for three years.

On this bridge, on February 27, 2015, Boris Nemtsov, an opposition
politician, was shot and killed, in plain view of the Kremlin. Nemtsov,
who was fifty-five, had lived several lives. He had been a promising
physicist—so much so that his relatives were certain that he would win
the Nobel Prize one day. Instead, when perestroika started, he became
involved in politics and, at the age of thirty-one, was appointed the
first post-Soviet governor of the Nizhny Novgorod region, on the Volga
River. For much of the nineteen-nineties, he was the favorite to succeed
Boris Yeltsin as President.

As the Yeltsin Presidency unravelled, Nemtsov fell out of favor, and an
entirely different successor, the secret-police chief Vladimir Putin,
emerged. Within a few years, Nemtsov had lost his seat in parliament
along with many of his old political allies, who had chosen to support
the new President. After a short stint in the private sector, Nemtsov
returned to politics as an opposition activist and started losing
personal friends, as well.

In 2008, Nemtsov, Garry Kasparov, the chess champion turned political
activist, and several other opposition figures co-founded a movement
they called Solidarity, after the labor-union movement that rose up
against the Soviet government in Poland, in 1980. Nemtsov compiled a
series of reports on corruption and abuse of power, and the organization
published and distributed them by handing them out in the streets, near
Moscow subway stations. Though it called itself a movement, Solidarity
was really a small organization of diehard activists: they distributed
the reports and organized occasional street protests, which usually drew
no more than a couple of hundred people. In 2009, a woman named Nadezhda
Mityushkina became the executive director of Solidarity. Mityushkina and
Nemtsov made an odd pair. She was younger than he but looked older. He
worked out obsessively, maintained a year-round tan, and favored tight
jeans and unbuttoned shirts; Mityushkina was the opposite of all that.
They talked all the time, and most of Solidarity’s projects were things
that Nemtsov and Mityushkina did together.

In December, 2011, a rally organized by Solidarity unexpectedly drew
about ten thousand participants. This marked the beginning of a wave of
mass protests that lasted until May 6, 2012, when, on the eve of Putin’s
third Presidential inauguration, the police brutally broke up a
peaceful, legal march. During the political crackdown that followed,
Solidarity reverted to being a tiny movement. Kasparov and many other
prominent activists left the country. Nemtsov continued to publish
reports and organize protests. On February 27, 2015, just before
midnight, he was killed.

By morning, people had begun laying flowers at the site of the shooting.
Then they brought flags, signs, and portraits of Nemtsov, creating a
makeshift memorial. After a few weeks, the city removed the memorial,
and it was around then that Mityushkina took charge of maintaining it;
it seemed like the thing to do. By mid-April, 2015, the memorial had
been removed and reconstituted four times. Mityushkina and her
Solidarity comrades decided that they needed an around-the-clock vigil.
They initially assumed that they would be able to staff the site only on
weekends, and the memorial would have to be created anew every week. But
a second group of volunteers—many of them people who didn’t have day
jobs—formed to keep vigil during the week. All together, around a
hundred activists keep the memorial protected.

On February 28th, the living memorial to Boris Nemtsov will enter its
fourth year of continuous existence. The city sends workers to dismantle
it irregularly: sometimes they come several times a week, Mityushkina
told me, and sometimes they leave the memorial alone for several weeks.
Then, there is the non-governmental violence: vandals who attack the
memorial and, with some regularity, thugs who attack the activists. Last
week, a Solidarity volunteer was hospitalized with minor injuries. In August, 2017, a weekday volunteer died after he was beaten on the bridge.

Reconstituting the memorial has become almost routine; there is even a
Web site that people can use to order flowers to be delivered to the
bridge. Indeed, many aspects of memorializing Namtsov have become
routine, Mityushkina said. Because Nemtsov’s daughter Zhanna, who used
to tend to his grave, has had to leave the country, so the task has
fallen to the volunteers. They also organize an annual march to
commemorate the killing; this past weekend, it drew about eight thousand
participants—the lowest number yet. Solidarity also organized a one-day
exhibit on the anniversary of the murder. The activists took the name
for the exhibit from something Nemtsov said in his last interview, given
a few hours before his death: “The Price of Freedom Is High.”

The price of maintaining the memorial can seem awfully high, too, what
with the flowers, and the portraits that must be printed and framed anew
every time, and the hours logged by volunteers who work six-hour shifts
in all kinds of Moscow weather. It may seem quixotic to risk death to
protect a constellation of flowers, photographs, and flags. But it is
perhaps the most radical political statement possible in Russia today,
and it is being made, around the clock, by a bunch of ragtag volunteers
standing a stone’s throw from the Kremlin: there lived a man named Boris
Nemtsov, he fought to the death, and he will not be forgotten.